12
I was sitting in the coffee shop – writing a long, grovelling email to Virginia at the Independent – when Mia walked in, looking hunted. I waved, and she darted across the café like a Toby-seeking missile and grabbed my arm.
“Don’t wave,” she said. “Jesus, didn’t you get his text?”
“No,” I said, immediately worried. “What’s the matter? You look awful.”
“I am awful,” she said. “And I’ll be your worst nightmare if you don’t come with me.”
“Where?”
“Derby Gate. It’s urgent.”
I stashed the laptop. I had a billion questions to ask her but she was rushing ahead, and I was trying to figure out why I hadn’t heard any text alerts from Derek. Then I remembered; he’d reached out and muted it in the middle of a sweaty morning quickie.
There was a message from him. my office, now. this is not a sex thing. category five shitstorm.
Mia barrelled across Whitehall, stopping briefly by the Cenotaph to flip off a cab driver before running across the other side of the road.
“What’s wrong?” I said, genuinely scared by now. “Is he all right?”
“He’s fine,” she said, as we hustled towards the shadow cabinet offices. “He’s an idiot, but I expect you knew that anyway. You were there in Eastbourne, after all.”
“Oh. Fuck. That?”
“Yes. That. Someone at the Daily Express took time out from tongue-fucking a twenty year old Diana conspiracy theory and talked to a hotel receptionist who swore she saw someone who looked like Derek Waterhouse entering and leaving the hotel with a pizza.”
“Did anyone point out that he might have a pizza-delivering doppelganger?”
“Of course they did,” said Mia, punching the lift button with a thumb. “But why was he leaving with a pizza? That was the thrust of the argument. A delivery guy would just drop the pizza off and leave.”
“Not if the pizza was really disgusting and the customer sent it back,” I said. She gave me a long look and I felt duty bound to elaborate. “Like if it had pineapple on it.”
Mia looked me up and down and sighed. “I don’t know what you’ve got in your trousers,” she said. “But it must be fucking amazing.” The lift doors opened and she pushed me out. “Move.”
Derek was in his office, already a finger deep into a large glass of Glenmorangie. “You muted my phone,” I said. “What are we going to do?”
He tapped the whiskey bottle with a pencil. “I’d highly recommend drinking,” he said, looking shaken. “I just spent a hairy hour in the whip’s office, and it wasn’t the kind of whip I usually enjoy.”
“Oh my God,” I said, dropping into a nearby chair. “What are they going to do to you?”
He fished in a drawer, found an old 2012 Olympics mug – complete with the ‘obscene Lisa Simpson’ logo that to this day has never been adequately explained – and poured me a drink. “Not sure,” he said. “Apparently they’re flying blind on precedent because nobody has ever been stupid enough to make a booty call to the other side’s party conference before.”
“I say we concern-troll them about their conference security,” said Mia. “Just be like ‘what the fuck were you thinking letting randos just wander in and out deliver pizza?’”
Derek rinsed a mouthful of single malt over his gums and grimaced. “‘What the fuck were you thinking letting randos wander in and out with pizza?’” he said. “Yes, that’s certainly got a ring to it, Mia. Ring of desperation, perhaps?”
“No,” she said, folding her arms. “They’re fucking lucky it was only you. It could just have easily been some snotty little ISIS twat with a backpack full of homemade explosives, and then it would have been boom time and the entire government would have been going home in a series of bin liners.”
“True,” said Derek. “Would have made the Brighton bombing look like a matinee production of Mamma Mia.”
“That’s not fair,” I said. One of the things I’d always loved about Derek was his profound contempt for musicals. “Have you even seen Mamma Mia?”
“No. And unless it actually killed five people and paralysed a cabinet minister’s wife then I don’t think it could possibly be worse, Toby.”
Mia sucked her teeth. “Yeah, but have you heard Pierce Brosnan sing?”
“Seriously,” I said. “Made Gerard Butler sound like Pavarotti. And he’s going to do it again in the sequel.”
“They’re doing a sequel?” said Derek, looking horrified. “Haven’t they shat on Abba enough?” He shook himself. “Wait – no. Fuck this, fuck Abba and fuck James Bond. This is irrelevant. What the actual pink fuck are we even talking about? Conference security, Mia. Hit me with your damage limitation. Unless you think I should sing a public apology in the form of an Abba number?”
“Depends,” she said. “Can you sing?”
“No,” I said, having heard him in the shower. “He sounds like a dying goose.”
Derek gave us both a look that said enough was definitely enough this time.
“Don’t apologise,” said Mia. “No apologies, no specific denials. Just hint that the crackpots at the Express have been huffing paint again and what the hell does it say that people are just casually delivering pizzas to the government when we’re supposed to be on the highest terrorist alert like, ever.”
“Muddies the water,” he said.
“Exactly. Then maybe we drag the police into this.”
“The police?” I said.
“Yeah. Terror status is beyond critical and the police and the security services aren’t being given the funding they need to do their jobs. The problem with conference security is part of a wider malaise in which the government is cynically snatching funding from the public sector to plug the deficit…and do use the word snatching.”
“Milk snatcher Thatcher,” said Derek, nodding as if hypnotised by the spin unfolding before him.
“Taking the squeezed public sector for every penny they’ve got while their billionaire mates get to keep socking it away in the Cayman Islands.” Mia was building to her big finish now. “We won’t do that. We’re going to go after the tax cheats and put that money back into essential public services.”
I blinked at her, astonished that an entire offensive had been somehow spun out of Derek being spotted sneaking into a hotel in Eastbourne. It was both impressive and completely absurd.
“Or,” I said. “We could just say he was there because he missed me? I mean, that’s true, right?”
“Wrong,” said Derek. “Once you’re elected to parliament you’re not longer allowed to have genitals, never mind use them. Our private members are public members. We should have them removed. Just have a Ken doll bump and a flesh coloured portcullis stamped on our backsides.”
“Right,” said Mia, not looking up from her phone. “It’s in motion. Already happening.”
“What?” said Derek. “Removing my cock and balls?”
“No. The talking point. Conference security is shit. Security overall is shit. The police need more money to do their jobs.” Her phone shuddered and she answered. “Dan, hi. Yeah, that was me. Can we get this trending on Twitter? I want experts weighing in with a review of conference security. And coppers. Can you get me beat down, salt-of-the-earth police officers who can’t make ends meet. Bonus points if they have to commute from fucking Wales every morning…” She stepped out into the hallway and closed the door, leaving me feeling more than a little dazed.
“I think I might have that Scotch after all,” I said, and reached for the Olympics mug.
Derek sat back in his chair, looking worried. He was so pale that I could see the yellowish shadows of the fading bruises around his eyes. “Will you still love me if I end up being consigned to the back benches?” he said.
“Of course.”
“What if I lose my seat?”
“You know I will.”
He swished the whiskey around in his glass and swallowed the rest. “What if I end up on I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here?”
“Yeah,” I said, picturing him getting waspish with soap stars and doing unfortunate things with live cockroaches. “You’re on your own with that one.”
We heard Mia shriek in the corridor. He frowned and got up from the desk, but she was already back, having practically wrenched the door from its hinges in her hurry to open it. She was grinning like a maniac.
“Step away from the bottle, Drunky,” she said. “You’re fucking on.”
“Me?” said Derek. “Isn’t this going to be one for home affairs?”
“This is, yeah,” said Mia. “But Jesus loves you, for some reason. There’s been a huuuuuge fuck up over at Health.”
“What? Ebola outbreak? Because that’s probably the only thing that could distract from our current flailing.”
She shook her head, still grinning. “Massive. Fucking. Data. Loss.”
Derek stood up, eyes wide. “Oh my God. How big?”
“Like, five years worth. If you handle this, there’s no way they’re going to kick you out for something as petty as trying to get shagged in Eastbourne.”
He nodded. “Got it.”
“It’s perfect, Derek. If Tristram Handy so much as mentions the conference thing then he’s lost the argument. It’s like…it’s a point of debate or something. Has a name and everything.”
“Ad hominem,” said Derek, retrieving his tie from the back of his chair. “It’s a logical fallacy. You see where your ‘gross’ and ‘problematic’ gets you, Mia? It’s all very emotive, but it’s no substitute for a solid grounding in debate.”
“Whatever, white boy,” she said. “Let’s go. The BBC is gagging for it.”
“You might want to lie low for a bit,” said Mia. “The Express hacks are probably out looking for you about the Eastbourne story. Little do they know it’s about to get steamrollered, but…”
“Oh God,” I said, unsure as to where I was supposed to put myself.
Derek pulled on his coat. “You can hole up here,” he said.
“Can I? That’s good. I still have to finish apologising to the Independent.”
He leaned over and kissed me. “I’ll be back before you know it,” he said. “Have fun, and whatever you do, don’t look in the second drawer down under the desk.”
I looked at him, looked at the drawer and immediately gave in. If I’d been the star of the Bluebeard story, you could have told the whole thing in about two paragraphs. It couldn’t have been anything more eyebrow-raising than the things I’d found under his bed. On top of a pile of papers was a large black buttplug, still in its packaging. I closed the drawer.
“Not sure what I was expecting, really,” I said.
“I told you not to look,” he said, adjusting his scarf and giving me a predatory grin. “You’ve spoiled the surprise now.”
“Yeah. I don’t think anything that size is ever going to have the element of surprise on its side.”
“That’s what lubricant is for,” he said. “And blindfolds. See you in a bit.”
“Yeah, okay.”
I took out my laptop and returned to the email I’d been agonising over for almost a week now. I didn’t want to write it, and it was all too easy to just switch to News 24 where I could watch the newest catastrophe unfold. It sounded like the government had farmed out NHS IT contracts to private bidders, gone with the cheapest and had - like this hadn’t happened a million times before - been surprised to discover that when you paid peanuts you got monkeys. At least, that looked like the story on the surface, but the name Bledsoe - the firm contracted to do the business - kept bouncing around in my head looking for something to connect with.
After a while the newsreader announced that they would be speaking live to the Health Secretary and his opposite number, and I wondered if I had time to lay hands on a bag of popcorn. Bramble was shuffling uncomfortably in a studio somewhere, looking as though he was trying to remember how to blink. Someone had obviously once told him that blinking too often made you look shifty, but Bramble had taken this to the extreme and now had a blink rate so reptilian that it was impossible to talk to him without wondering if David Icke had been completely wrong about the whole interdimensional lizard thing.
On the other hand Derek was coming from an outside link in Parliament Square and looked fetchingly windswept and just the right side of rosy from a stiff belt of Glenmorangie. Or maybe I was just besotted. He was insanely photogenic.
“And I am joined now by the Health Secretary, Tristram Bramble MP, and the shadow health secretary Derek Waterhouse MP. Derek Waterhouse, have you been following developments on this breaking story?”
“I have, yes,” said Derek. “Although it’s hard to keep pace with the continual avalanche of incompetence we’ve come to expect from this government. This is a shocking breach of patient confidentiality, and the worst part is that it’s not even the first time that it’s happened. Clearly no lessons were learned from the last data leak.”
Bramble bugged his eyes and the presenter - Erica Lane - recognised his plea for attention. “Health Secretary, how do you respond?”
“Well, for a start can I just say that this was a data loss, not a data leak...”
Derek gave a scornful laugh. “Oh, well, that makes it much better...”
“...and as far as we know patient records were not compromised...”
“...how?” said Derek. “It’s a data loss. Which means the data has been erased or you currently have no idea where it is. That’s the one of the definitions of ‘loss’, Tristram - when you don’t know where something is. How can you assure people that their medical records aren’t sitting around on a thumb drive under a bus seat, like the last time this happened?”
“I can categorically assure patients that the data was secured, and that their medical records are safe.”
“And you’re prepared to go on the record with that, Health Secretary?” said Erica.
“Absolutely.”
“And what will the Department of Health be doing to investigate this leak...loss...whichever it turns out to be?”
“I imagine they’ll be looking under a lot of bus seats,” said Derek, making me laugh out loud. Even Erica smothered a smile. Bramble, on the other hand, looked sick as a pig.
“It’s all very well to mock while you’re in opposition,” said Bramble. “But this is exactly the kind of cheap political point scoring that helps nobody. And I think it’s rather disgraceful that you’re making light of this situation, Mr Waterhouse...”
Derek composed himself, but there was a gleam in his eye that I knew meant he was annoyed. Like me he didn’t care for this kind of pearl clutching and it brought out the worst in him. “I apologise, Health Secretary,” he said. “I would hate to convey the impression I find this situation funny, when in fact I find it absolutely enraging. This is not the first time you’ve dropped this particular ball by tossing it to cheap and incompetent IT firms–”
“–ah, I’m going to stop you right there because the IT firm in question has a long and respectable history of data security, which you would know if you’d done your homework and spent less time sneaking around Eastbourne–”
Oh fuck.
“–Eastbourne?” said Derek, laughing. “What are you talking about? What would I know about Eastbourne, other than the rumours that you were using the conference to sound out your leadership bid? Perhaps that’s why you’re so distracted from the matter in...”
I turned off the feed, my heart pounding.
He’d done it. He’d let himself get backed in a corner and used the thing I had told him to keep to himself. I had a brief vision of the person I’d imagined him to be before any of this started, and it was so ugly that it made me feel queasy. He’d tossed Jacinta to the wolves, and it didn’t matter that he didn’t know her, because it was the exact same way he’d once made a fool of me.
I tried to plaster an appropriately non-judgemental look on my face, but it wasn’t working, because the first thing he said when he came back through the door was “Oh, don’t look at me like that.”
“And why shouldn’t I?” I said. “I told you something in confidence. I explicitly asked you not to spread it. And you – if I remember correctly – said yes.”
He sighed and unwound the scarf from his neck.
“No, don’t sigh,” I said. “Why did you do just that?”
“Because he started it,” he said, sounding so childish and yet so utterly political that I wanted to slap him. This was exactly why people never went to the polls, because nobody wanted to vote for a bunch of noisy, overgrown public schoolboys. “You saw it, didn’t you? He brought up Eastbourne. I was on the ropes. I had to come back with something.”
“Good,” I said, packing up my laptop. “I’m glad. I hope you ‘won’ the exchange, and I hope it was worth it, because that poor, twitchy horsey girl is probably trying to stuff herself into an incinerator right about now.”
“Oh, fuck her,” said Derek.
“Fuck her?”
He dropped into the chair behind his desk. “You know what I mean,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do. I know exactly what you mean. ‘Fuck her’, as applied to a living, breathing, probably quite mad human being. It’s not exactly ambiguous, is it? What is she? Collateral? Is that how it was with me when you got caught out getting a little too Leninist for the middle ground? ‘What about that poor gullible twat from the Guardian?’ ‘Oh, fuck him.’ Is that how it went, Derek?”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Okay, I think you’re overreacting…”
“No. Don’t you ever tell me I’m overreacting?”
“Even when you are?”
“I’m not,” I said.
Derek sighed again. “Yes, you are. You overreact to everything, Toby. I get a migraine aura and you think it’s a brain tumour. I get ambushed by Blairites one time and you think it’s all part of a plot to personally gaslight you. Can you not see it? You must see it: sometimes you come across completely fucking mental.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Well, forgive me,” I said. “Excuse me for caring that you might have been bleeding into your brain.”
“But I wasn’t,” he said, with a desperation that said I’d pushed him too far. “Do you have any idea what it’s like having someone treat you like you’re some kind of medical timebomb about to go off? You were looking at me like I was about to drop dead at any moment.”
“I was worried.”
“You’re always worried,” he said. “I can’t stand it anymore, Toby. You make me feel like that French king who went so fucking mad he thought he was made of glass. Stop projecting your own fragility onto everyone. Onto me, onto Horsey McHorseface or whatever her silly posh name was. Just…” He took a breath. “Just stop.”
The room fell quiet. Too quiet. But there was nothing I could say, nothing that wouldn’t make things much, much worse.
“Right,” I said, gathering up my things.
“I’m sor–”
“–no,” I said. “Don’t you dare. You’ve said it now.”
“Toby, please.”
I shook my head, appalled that he could cause me this much pain. “Don’t make this worse,” I said. “I’m going round the corner to the Arse End and you are not going to follow me. You’re not going to win me round with drinks or sex, so don’t even try.”
I could see in his eyes that I’d hurt him back, and a sick little part of me was glad.
“Can I at least apologise?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Can you? And can you mean it?”
It had started to rain outside, compounding my fury as I stomped round the corner to the pub. I walked in and almost walked right back out again, because there – directly facing the door – was Jacinta. She was tapping something into her phone, but then she looked up, saw me and there was no backing out without looking like an even bigger shithead than I did already. Her eyes were red and puffy.
“Glenmorangie,” I said to the barman. “And whatever she’s having.”
She shook her head. “No, thank you.”
“Or not.” I didn’t press it. It seemed creepy to try and force drinks on a woman who wanted nothing to do with you.
“Look,” I said, after a long, uncomfortable hush. “If anyone asks me where I heard it, I’ll just deny that I heard it from you. That’s all. Simple as that.”
Jacinta snorted. “Too late. Tris already texted me. He’s furious. He knows it couldn’t have come from anyone else: we only talked about it at Daddy’s place in the New Forest.”
“Well, couldn’t it have come from anyone else who happened to be at Daddy’s place?”
She glared. “Yes,” she said. “Except out of all those people guess which one was spotted talking to Derek Waterhouse’s fucking boy toy in Eastbourne?”
“Right,” I said. I really didn’t need any more booze, but the second whiskey was slipping down far too easily. Maybe I’d just pursue my previous ambition and become a full time alcoholic. It seemed a lot less stressful than journalism. “It doesn’t look good, does it?”
“Everyone always said I was an idiot,” said Jacinta. “And now I suppose I am.”
“You’re not,” I said. “You said something you shouldn’t have, I said something I shouldn’t have and…Derek betrayed my confidence.”
She sniffed and gathered up her handbag. “Well, he is rather awful.”
“He’s not.”
She arched an eyebrow. “If you want my advice,” she said. “Get out while you still can. Whole family was a bit weird, if you want to know the truth. It’s probably a mercy that he’s the last of them and unlikely to breed.”
“Breed?” I said, but she was gone. So much for her mental fragility. Maybe Derek had been right, and I had just been projecting. Had I just torpedoed my best chance at a functional adult relationship by defending the honour and sanity of a bone thick posho who appeared to be channelling the ghost of Unity Mitford?
No. It didn’t work like that. Even she deserved better than being thoughtlessly thrown under the bus. It was time Derek learned that he couldn’t keep on treating people like that.
*
He didn’t try to call me, but I supposed I’d asked for that.
I spent an uncomfortable night alone, worrying if I’d finally hurt him beyond even the usual Derek grand gestures of flowers or dinner, still not completely sure that he didn’t deserve it. But as the hours ticked on I began to feel more and more sorry for him, and for myself. When I thought of him alone in his big bed on the other side of the river it was all I could do from picking up the phone at one in the morning and telling him he could win me back any way he wanted, just so long as he tried.
But he didn’t, and I was beginning to worry.
I distracted myself by following the latest Trump meltdown in America, but it wasn’t easy. To make matters worse the name ‘Bledsoe’ – with its hard, Hunnic cadence – kept rumbling in the back of my mind. When I eventually Googled the name it all became clear. Kaz Blesdoe, who was ‘a scream’ according to Jacinta. Kaz was Caroline, who ran an IT firm. And Caroline’s sister? She was better known by her married name – Jane Bramble.
The most astounding part was how open it all was. Surely everyone had known that Kaz Bledsoe’s IT firm had got the NHS contract because she was the Health Secretary’s sister-in-law, but apparently nobody gave a shit. It was depressing and infuriating; growing up I’d always imagined that political journalism had required at least some kind of effort, if not an actual Deep Throat to swing by the underground car park in a trenchcoat and hand you a couple of hints, but this was bullshit. This was bollock naked public nepotism and it had taken me less than fifteen minutes to uncover. Why was nobody else Googling this? Were they all off writing fucking thinkpieces about the misogyny inherent in disliking pumpkin spice lattes? No wonder creatures like Bramble and the Trumps existed. They were allowed to exist, allowed to carry on grifting and handing out appointments like latter day Borgias, only if the Borgias had had really shit taste in art. Why had I ever wanted to do this?
Well, if everyone else was going to carry on ignoring this, that was fine. But I wasn’t.
Steeling myself, I picked up the phone and called Derek.
It went to voicemail, catching me off guard, so that the carefully rehearsed tone I’d cultivated beforehand (not too apologetic, not too neutral) immediately went to shit.
“Uh, hi,” I said. “It’s me. I just…um…I thought you should know. I did some digging last night.” Oh God. I sounded like I’d literally been robbing graves. “I remembered the name Bledsoe, and I’ve just realised from where. The IT firm belongs to Bramble’s sister-in-law, and I don’t know if you can use that, but…”
There was a click and a beep on the end of the line. I thought for a brief moment that I’d been cut off, but then I heard Derek. Not his voice. Just his breath. That intake of air that said he was annoyed, or about to say something serious. My stomach dropped, and I wasn’t even sure why.
“Toby,” he said.
“Hi,” I said, trying to sound cheerful and ordinary. “So you are there?”
“Obviously.”
Oh God. He sounded cold and sore, and I was desperately sorry for everything I’d said the day before. “Were you avoiding me?” I asked, beginning to feel a bit sick.
He paused, as if he were choosing his next words carefully. “You were very angry with me,” he said.
“Yes, I was, but–”
“–no,” he said, cutting me off.
“No?” I said. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”
Horrible little rat claws of panic scrabbled at the inside of my stomach. What was he doing? Was this his way of paying me back for yesterday?
“I mean that maybe it’s better if we just…leave things here.”
“Leave things?” I said. I was floating above myself now, like that time when I was nine and I’d fallen off a trampoline and found one half of my forearm sticking out at perfect right angles to the other. How my sister had screamed, but I had somehow come untethered from my body, divorced from pain it knew I couldn’t handle.
Derek didn’t say anything, and I knew what was coming.
“You’re dumping me,” I said, icy calm now. “Over the phone?”
“It’s not like that.”
“It sounds like that.”
He sighed long and hard. “Look, I like you a lot, but–”
“–no,” I said. “You love me. I love you. We didn’t get here for nothing.”
All that heartache, all that joy. All the things we’d done to accommodate one another and let our guards down. I wasn’t going to let him throw that away just because we’d had a small, stupid argument. Why was he punishing me this way?
And then he said the unforgivable thing. “It’s not you–”
“–oh, don’t you dare, Derek.”
He sniffed and I could hear the tears in his voice. I was glad he was crying. He deserved to be in tears, because I was beyond them right now. I was in shock, floundering around unable to understand why this terrible thing was happening to me.
“Toby, please listen,” he said. “It really is me. You know before you came along I’d been alone for a long time, and there’s a reason for that. Maybe I’m not supposed to have a relationship with anyone.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t explain right now. Please don’t make this any harder than it has to be.”
“It doesn’t have to be at all,” I said, my voice rising in desperation. “We have a single, stupid row and you do this?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to go.”
I stared at the silent phone for a long moment, no longer floating, no longer separate from myself. Like when we’d arrived at the hospital and the first soothing rush of neurochemicals had worn off and I’d felt the bones of my arm grate against one another. That’s when the pain had become real.
With a scream, I hurled the phone across the room. I heard it crack against the blue marble mantelpiece and something flew off to the side. The destruction gave me only a brief moment’s satisfaction before the horror of it all settled again. I was alone, and broken, and nothing in the world would ever be right again.
“What am I going to do?” I said, out loud. “Oh God, what the fuck am I going to do?”